Tag: music

How To Make Music Like – Michael Bibi (Part 4 – CAPONNE)

Ableton Tutorial 2 : Como fazer um drop estilo Michael Bibi & Pawsa do zero

It’s a small channel with just 3 videos and 110 subscribers, but this particular video has had 3,333 views since its release in March 2020 so it’s worth looking it. CAPONNE offers up 16 bars of his take on how to make a track like Michael Bibi & Pawsa, and whilst there is more than what Julien offers in many of his videos, it’s not really sufficiently in depth enough to be much use – especially as stuttered rap vocals aren’t what I’d consider to be synonymous with Michael Bibi. That being said, let’s dive in.

What we are prestented with here is a standard 4/4 kick pattern with the obligatory skippy extra hits at the end of each 2nd bar. The bassline is unusually very simple and CAPONNE relies on the hats and tambourine mostly for the groove. One real positive I picked up from this was his use of a stuttered white noise effect at the start of each 8 bar segment. I’d not seen or noticed that before, and then I saw it again a few days later being used by James Hype in one of his remix videos (this one I think), so I had to use that in my track.

Here is my track based on what CAPONNE was doing;

The main takeaway here is that I thought this was more Dennis Cruz than Michael Bibi so I used his track My Fellas as and inspiration. I couldn’t find a good rap vocal to sit with the drums I’d created and then Sir Mix-A-Lot turned up in a search of popular TikTok music. The decision made itself, even though it’s been used thousands of times before.

stuttered white noise

I kept the bassline simple and focused on using percussive hits to provide groove and variation, including using the stuttered white noise. For the previous 3 tracks I went with the skippy drums, but here I stuck firmly with a standard 4/4 pattern.

To keep the track in keeping with sound of Dennis Cruz I purchased his sample pack from samplesoundmusic.com. It’s not a great pack to be honest and you’re probably better off spending your £15.99 elsewhere.

Here is the full arrangement of my track – it looks fairly complex at first glance, but it’s mostly different percussive fills dotted around to create variation.

Full arrangement

Four down and plenty more to go! The next one will be Sai Lika – Making Tech House sound like Michael Bibi – Ableton 10 Free Template

If you’re reading this and want to hear the previous 3 tracks I’ve made, then I have a playlist on youtube that groups everything I’ve made so far together – you can find that here.

How To Make Music Like – Michael Bibi (Part 3 – Julien Earle)

Making A FULL Tech House Track Like Michael Bibi & PAWSA From Start To Finish [+Samples]

Julien around this time tended to put out short videos with just 8 bar loops, but this one promises a full tech house track. In reality it’s not quite that as it’s just 48 bars and is basically an intro, build and short drop, but it’s the best starting point of the three videos I’ve looked at so far. This is reinforced by its popularity, having had 46,225 views since its release in June 2019. I would guess a fair few producers have followed along with this

Now, my first observation about this video is that although aspects of it remind me of the style of music Michael Bibi was making in 2019, but it actiually reminded me of a tune that featured in sets played by Michael. Check out Michael Bibi | Set [Lost City] [Lost Beach] [Quito, Ecuador 2019] and at approximately 4 minutes into the video he drops Roger That – How Does It Feel which I think is the inspiration for Juliens video.

As with his first video, which I covered here, Julien focuses on similar traits – bouncy kick drum pattern, groove from the hats & percs and of course, lots of saturation. What seemed out of place was the dominant white noise sweeps, but they make sense when you listen to Roger That – along with the synth stab call and response.

So with that in mind, this is my interpretation of this tutorial (obviously without using the same Blue Monday vocal as the Roger That tune).

For the previous two tracks I’ve made I used bass samples, but for this track to remain in keeping with what Julien suggests in his video, I used Operator to create an FM Bass along with CamelCrusher to give it some distortion.

Main bass

To give the bass some extra width and weight I created a second channel using exactly the same Operator patch but this time I used a different distortion, EQ’d out the lows and then widened it with Ozone Imager.

Wide top bass

And this is the full arrangement.

Is Juliens tutorial any good? Well, it’s not bad to be fair. If you follow along and apply some simple arrangement to extend the track beyond 48 bars, you’ll end up with something reasonable I would imagine – just go easy on the white noise sweeps!

Now at this point I will note that Julien put out a lot of very similar videos;
How To Michael Bibi Style Tech House [+Samples]
How To Tech House Basslines Like Patrick Topping, Fisher, Michael Bibi & Toolroom [+Samples]
How To Make Tech House Drums Like Michael Bibi, Fisher & Hot Since 82 [+Samples]
Tech House Tutorial Like Cloonee, Michael Bibi & Fisher [+Samples]
… and so on

For the most part these are focused on his sample pack and how it can be used to create tracks similar to the artists mentioned in the titles. I won’t spend any time on these as there isn’t much new ground covered, so next up it will be CAPONNE – Como fazer um drop estilo Michael Bibi & Pawsa do zero

How To Make Music Like – Michael Bibi (Part 2 – Djbods)

How To Make Tech House Like Michael Bibi & Pawsa: Part 1

Despite me wanting to avoid Hanging Tree, in this video Djbods uses it as his reference track and attempts to combine it with elements from the Michael Bibi Remix of Eyes on Fire by Blue Foundation. Personally I’ve never really liked guitars in tech house, so this was going to be a challenge for me from the outset. This video has had 5,310 views at the time of writing and the comments are generally positive.

The video was released on the 19th Sept 2019 and is an analysis of an unfinished, and incomplete, track that Djbods was intending to release. The following key features of a Michael Bibi track he identifies as follows;

Kick – beefy with a lot of drum bus/saturation. Considers that it may be a heavily processed 909 kick but can’t replicate it
Bass – created a sub bass with Serum. Has a lot of dirt grit & ‘low end shit’
Clap – wide & splashy. He creates a rhythm clap pattern very similar to what’s in Hanging Tree
Hats – considers these to be very important and that each hat should be identifiable and clear in the mix – layering is important
Snare builds – unusual placing in what seems like random parts of track
Vocals – samples obtained from Splice and creates chops that have a call & response

He also identified the use of a hi-string synth in the background to build tension, some white noise shots that have stereo width and lastly a short snare roll fill.

Like Julien Earle did in my previous post, Djbods places a lot of focus on saturation and the use of Drum Bus in Ableton. Unfortunately the second part to this video was never made and, from what I can see, the track was never completed and released.

To follow along with this jist of this video, the only option really was to go with a track in the style of Hanging Tree (but without using the same vocal). This is what I came up with.

There is a reason why appalachian ballads aren’t used in tech house – the whole vibe just doesn’t sit right, unless of course you have the inspiration to use the Jennifer Lawrence performance of Hanging Tree. With over 20 million hits on youtube and 6 million on Spotify (I think it’s been removed from this platform due to a copyright infringement) that definitely was a recipe for success. For my track, rather than using the same vocal I looked for an alternative, which wasn’t easy. The final choice was ‘Calling Me Home‘ by Kathy Mattea.

Essentially with what Djbods is covering in his video, I feel isn’t a recipe for success. Although he makes some good observations about clarity of drums in the mix and also points out the not so obvious placement of snare rolls (and other FX) by Michael Bibi, the fact that part 2 was never published leads me to think he abandoned this track – or at least considered the end result not to be good enough to release.

From the advice given, here are some of the ways I implemented them in my track.

Beefy kick with heavy saturation
Gritty bass (from sample)
Call & response vocal

And this is the full arrangement which also shows the use of layered claps and open hats

It’s a country mile away from Hanging Tree and I used the guitar very sparingly without making it the focus of the track – instead I used it just to accent the vocal in places and as a dub like stab for ear candy.

Next up it’s another Julien Earle tutorial, but this one is a track from start to finish – Making A FULL Tech House Track Like Michael Bibi & PAWSA From Start To Finish [+Samples]

How To Make Music Like – Michael Bibi

I started thinking about the usefulness of the ‘how to’ music production videos on youtube after, somewhat ironically, watching something on youtube that wasn’t particularly complimentary about this style of content. Essentially the premise was that most, but not all, of these videos exist solely to sell a sample pack or a patreon subscription, which is fair enough I think, but does this make them any less useful? Lets see. I’ve picked an artist I listen to a fair bit and whose style of music is very close to what I make and, more importantly, there are a fair few ‘how to make music like’ videos to be followed.

How to make music like – Michael Bibi

Before I crack on with this, I would like to mention that Michael has been battling cancer and it was great to see him post recently on Instagram that he’s responded well to treatment and he’s on the path to recovery. 💪

How To Tech House Like Michael Bibi & Pawsa

I’ve decided to start with the oldest and work my way through to the most recent. Although there is a remake of Hanging Tree from 4 years ago I decided to skip over this as it’s somewhat reliant on the excellent Jennifer Lawrence vocals. Next on the list is this from Julien Earle, and it’s a popular one with over 10k views.

The video was released on the 14th Jun 2019 and is just an 8 bar loop. Julien has been very prolific with this style of video covering a lot of different artists and genres. Here he identifies the following key features of a Michael Bibi track;

Kick – beefy, low mid range heavy kick, powerful, saturated (skippy kick pattern noted)
Bass – FM sine wave bass playing notes E and A, warm and round (he subtly widens highs with chorus).
Tambourine/Hi-Hat – 2 different patterns. 16 hats and the tambourine on different pattern
Clap – punchy and fat, sits on top of the mix
Open Hat – Sharp tight hat (shuffles at the end of 2nd bar)

Overall Julien places a lot of focus on saturation. He also notes there should be too much stereo width as club system playback is often mono.

There is not a lot to go on here for anyone to make a full track, but it’s a start. I looked at what Michael was releasing 4 years ago to try and establish what the inspiration was;

Skream & Michael Bibi – Otto’s Chant (Original Mix)
Michael Bibi – Frequency (Original Mix)
Michael Bibi – Got The Fire (Original Mix)

I decided to use Got The Fire as the reference for my own track and to use Juliens advice in my production decisions. This is what I came up with.

There isn’t a great deal of complexity to this tune so it worked quite well for this particular example. Starting with the kick, I chose one very similar to Juliens

My Kick
Juliens Kick

I also used exactly the same hi-hat as Julien for the accent hat pattern. For the other drum and percussion samples I chose similar sounds from various free sample packs. I decided against a tambourine and went for a shaker instead.

There is one issue I have with the advice given by Julien here, and that’s the bass. To my ears it has too much mid range and not enough thump in the lows and it doesn’t sit nicely with the kick. It’s a short tutorial, and just an 8 bar loop, but I think it’s worth noting that there are no velocity changes and no groove applied to the drums. Essentially, it’s very basic. If I was relativelty new to music production I think I’d struggle to make a full length track from this.

This is my finished arrangement. It is very simple – kick, bass, clap, open hat, skippy hat, seed shaker, snare roll, a short fill, some background ambience, the motif from Got The Fire, a handful of FX, a hi-pitched string sound and the all important vocal chop, which I sampled from Common – The Corner ft. The Last Poets.

Next up, djbods – How To Make Tech House Like Michael Bibi & Pawsa: Part 1

Finishing Tracks Is Its Own Practice

Late last night I was catching up on my youtube subscriptions and this vid appeared on my feed from Bthelick. Now, I make a lot of music and I also publish a lot of it on Soundcloud, but I also sit on a lot and probably 1 in every 5 tracks I start, I don’t finish.

When I first started to get into music production, I spent a lot of time watching videos which claimed to help improve my music production. They can be useful to a certain extent (and I still and will continue to watch them) but in real life, to get better, I believe t’s simply a case of putting in the hours making music – the Malcolm Gladwell ten thousand hours assertion.

I’m roughly now 3 years in and have 264 tracks released on SoundCloud. I’ve had the odd success like 40 Degree Heatwave with over 4000 listens on youtube and more recently Let Me Hear You Say… on Soundcloud with over 1000 plays. These little blips are nice when they happen, and there really seems to be no indicator when they will. I’ve put out what I think are some great tracks only for them to be played a handful of times and then to disappear into the depths of my profile feed.

So, I scrolled back through my private tracks and found this. I made it around 3 or 4 months ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t release it at the time – I’m was probably unhappy with something minor so never considered it to be finished. It’s finished now as it’s public! Maybe this is ‘the one’ that makes me a superstar producer 😂

Get Loose – House

I sat on this for a few days because I wan’t so sure about it – something just seemed off so it was ready for the music graveyard. Gave it another listen this morning, and decided it’s just about good enough to keep, so here it is. The vocal sample chop comes from Raze – Bass Power, but as that’s been sampled to death already, I chopped up a small portion and rearranged to make some phrases that kind of sound like words, but aren’t.

Let Me Hear You Say… – Tech House

One more made using the East End Dubs sample pack plus an old vocal sample from the Zero-G disk 1 pack. Minimal tech house sounds, if that’s your cup of tea, then you might like this. Made myself some custom label artwork too rather than just using a blank whitelabel – looks nice and professional now heh!

Crazy – Tech House (East End Dubs)

I picked up the East End Dubs sample pack from Sample Market and made this. It’s basically my version of the first track off of Tools Vol. 1 using mostly samples from their pack. It’s alright, it sounded comparable to the download I was referencing, but then compared to the version on Soundcloud, it’s a long way off – so plenty to work on for me.